A 10 Isn’t Necessarily Perfect in New Scoring System for Gymnastics

In one of the most memorable moments in Olympic history, the American gymnast Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10.0 on her vault at the 1984 Los Angeles Games to clinch the all-around title.

No gymnast will repeat that feat at the Beijing Games, guaranteed.

The gymnastics scoring system based on a top mark of 10.0 will not exist at these Olympics. The system, which had been in use for about 80 years, was replaced two years ago with one that has no ceiling.

Some gymnastics purists, including Retton and her former coach, Bela Karolyi, are still mourning.

At the United States women’s Olympic team selection camp in July, Retton explained why she “hates” the new scoring. “It’s hard to understand,” she said. “I don’t even understand it.”

Nostalgic for the old system, she said: “It’s simple. People get it, and you don’t have to explain it. Everybody could relate to it. I miss it, and I think other people will, too.”

Karolyi was less genteel about losing the perfect 10.0: “It’s crazy, terrible, the stupidest thing that ever happened to the sport of gymnastics. How could they take away this beautiful, this most perfect thing from us, the one thing that separated our sport from the others?”

Spurred in part by the judging errors at the 2004 Olympics, the international gymnastics federation, known as the F.I.G., changed the system to better differentiate one gymnast’s routines from another’s.

Gymnasts now receive separate marks for degree of difficulty and for execution in each event. The two are added to obtain the overall score, which usually ranges from 14 to 17 for top-level gymnasts.

It is only possible, but not probable, for a gymnast to score a 10.0 in the execution appraisal.

“At first, it was very hard to make the transition, but now I think we’re used to it, even though the fans might not be,” said Chellsie Memmel, a member of the United States women’s team. “I do think a lot of people who watch these Olympics might be kind of confused.”

The new system is heavy on math and employs two sets of judges, an A panel and a B panel, to do the computations. Two A-panel judges determine the difficulty and technical content of each routine. Six B-panel judges score routines for execution, artistry, composition and technique.

The A-panel judges’ scorecards start at zero, and points are added to give credit for requirements, individual skills and skills performed in succession.

The A panel counts only the gymnast’s 10 most difficult skills, which are ranked from easiest to most difficult (from A to G for women and from A to F for men). An A-level skill, like a back handspring in the floor exercise, is worth one-tenth of a point. The value increases by one-tenth of a point for each subsequent level, meaning a B-level skill is worth two-tenths and an F-level is worth six-tenths.

Required elements add a maximum 2.5 points to the score. Extra points, either one-tenth or two-tenths, are given for stringing skills together.

Each judge adds the marks, then the two reach a consensus. Elite gymnasts usually have a difficulty score in the 6s; the toughest routines will have difficulty scores in the high 6s or 7s.

Nastia Liukin of the United States team, for example, performs a routine on the uneven bars that has a sky-high difficulty value of 7.7. Her father and coach, Valeri Liukin, crunched numbers last year to invent the complex, high-scoring routine.

He did the calculations on a Post-it before handing it to his daughter at practice one day. She gasped.

“I was like: Wow, you want me to do all of that? Is that possible?” Nastia Liukin said. “But then I realized that I need to do all that with this new scoring, if I even want to think about a gold medal. I said: OK, cool. I’ll learn it.”

At the United States championships in May, Liukin nailed her performance and scored a 17.1, the highest score by any gymnast from the United States since the system changed. She said she expected to score even higher at the Olympics.

Liukin could do just that if she is able to pull off the routine, which is filled with risky skills. At her best, Liukin seems as if she is weightless as she floats above and between the bars.

Photo

Mary Lou Retton during her perfect performance in the floor exercise in the Olympic individual all-around finals of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Credit
Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press

“In one segment, back to back, she does six D or E elements, which is pretty amazing,” said Pat Panichas, a United States gymnastics judge who will be working the Olympics. “That’s why her start value is one of the highest, if not the highest, anywhere. The system rewards difficulty.

“But the mistakes are also more costly.”

Which is where the judges on the B panel come in. They rate the execution, artistry and technique of a routine, starting at a score of 10.0 and deducting for errors.

A slightly bent knee can be a deduction of one-tenth of a point. A more drastically bent knee can cost three-tenths. In this system, the deductions jump from one-tenth to three-tenths to five-tenths. A fall costs a gymnast eight-tenths. In the old system, a fall was a five-tenths deduction.

The highest and the lowest of the judges’ scores are thrown out. The remaining four scores are averaged to obtain the final B-panel score.

On the scoreboard, the final score appears in big numbers, just above the gymnast’s marks for difficulty and execution.

“I like it because it separates the good gymnasts from the really, really good gymnasts,” said Paul Hamm, who was confirmed as the true Olympic champion in the all-around at the 2004 Athens Games — after two months of scoring controversy.

The new scoring system came about after the Athens Olympics, in which the South Korean team said that its gymnast Yang Tae Young — not Hamm — deserved to win the gold medal. The South Korean federation filed a protest two days after the medal ceremony, saying that Yang’s routine on the parallel bars had been mistakenly underscored by a tenth of a point.

The South Koreans insisted that the extra tenth would have moved Yang into first place.

Two months later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the medal belonged to Hamm, who will miss these Games with a hand injury. It said that the judges would have had to review the results of the entire all-around competition, not just Yang’s, to determine if the outcome would have differed.

The South Koreans also filed their complaint too late. And in the new system, the time limits remain the same. If a coach protests a difficulty score before the next gymnast competes, then officials will review the routine. If a dispute lingers, a written request for inquiry must be submitted before the start of the next rotation.

Under the new scoring system, if coaches have a problem with an execution score, they can do nothing. No inquiries or protests are allowed.

“It’s still not a perfect system,” said Martha Karolyi, the United States women’s national team coordinator. “It’s still judges deciding to give a credit to a skill or not. It’s still going to have errors because human beings are making the decisions.”

Some coaches say that the system was put in place too hastily after the Athens Games, and that it does not address many of the problems that cropped up there. Some have said that this system has its own problems, which include putting an emphasis on more challenging routines.

Miles Avery, who coaches Paul and Morgan Hamm, said the new system might encourage some athletes to perform perilous routines before they were ready.

“The possibility is there that athletes will think, I’ll put so much difficulty into my routine that it won’t be possible for anyone to catch me,” Avery said. “That’s when people get hurt.”

Some gymnasts seem willing to take the chance more than others.

The Chinese national team has routines with very high difficulty — so high that the team is already ahead of every other, on paper, before the Games begin, said Ron Brant, the United States men’s national team coordinator.

The more daring the routine, the greater the risk that errors will be made.

“When nerves kick in and the pressure is up, it tends to even things out,” Brant said.

In the new system, some events are more valuable toward the team total than others. For the men, the difficulty values for the vault and the still rings are usually higher than for other events. On the women’s side, the balance beam and the uneven bars usually have higher difficulty values.

For Bela Karolyi, it is unnecessarily complicated.

He recounted his first 10.0. Nadia Comaneci finished her initial routine on the uneven bars at the 1976 Games. The judges saw it as flawless and awarded the first perfect score in Olympic history.

“I had tears in my eyes because it was so gorgeous,” Karolyi said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gymnastics Scoring Puts No Limits on Perfection. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe